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As the deadline looms for eligible Oscar voters to file their nomination ballots, chances are looking strong that for the seventh consecutive year, the Academy Award for best picture of the year will go to a movie that began its march to Hollywood glory at the Toronto International Film Festival.

So far in awards season, the top contender has to be 12 Years a Slave, which had its world premiere in September as a special presentation at TIFF. More recently, it has been on every important list, including the 10 finalists named by the Producers Guild of America and the five Golden Globe nominees for best dramatic movie.

This epic has the patina of gravitas and social significance and historic sweep that the Academy loves to endorse.

Gravity is the only other movie from the TIFF lineup virtually sure to be a best-pic nominee. It had its North American premiere as a special presentation in Toronto just days after its world premiere at the Venice film festival — and was recently honoured by the Los Angeles Film Critics as one of the year’s two best movies (in a tie with Her).

But there’s a chance that Dallas Buyers Club, directed by Canadian Jean-Marc Vallee, could get a nomination, after being included in the PGA list.

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More than 5,000 members of the Academy are expected to file their nominations ballots by late Wednesday, and nominations will be announced on Thursday, Jan. 16. The envelopes will be opened on March 2.

Under the Academy’s complicated, revised rules for weighing ballots, there will be a minimum of five best-pic nominees and a maximum of 10. (Last year there were nine.)

The road from Toronto to the best-picture Oscar started in 1981 with Hugh Hudson’s Chariots of Fire, glorifying the British flag and fleetness of foot. It did not happen again until 1999, when American Beauty arrived in Toronto looking for a distributor and not only found a buyer but created a stir that ended with the best-picture Oscar.

In 2004, Canadian-born director Paul Haggis had the world premiere of Crash at TIFF and sold it to Lionsgate; 18 months later Crash upset Brokeback Mountain for the best-picture Oscar.

By that time, it was well known to studios, producers, journalists and publicists that a premiere at TIFF was the ideal way to position a movie for awards season.

TIFF’s current streak of launching six consecutive best-picture Oscar winners began in 2007 with the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men.

That started a phenomenon that continued with Slumdog Millionaire, The Hurt Locker, The King’s Speech, The Artist and Argo. (Some of those films screened earlier at the Telluride Film Festival, but it’s an exclusive event mostly geared to industry insiders, so they’re not considered true premieres.)

Considering that the Coen Brothers started the trend, it’s an irony that last fall their current movie, Inside Llewyn Davis, bypassed TIFF after having its world premiere in Cannes; instead it had its North American debut at the New York Film Festival. And though it has won many awards from critics’ groups, including the Toronto Film Critics Association and the National Society of Film Critics in the U.S., Llewyn Davis has been snubbed by the PGA, as well as the Directors Guild of America — which means a best-picture Oscar nomination is not guaranteed.

The Coen Brothers’ movie was just one of many potential best-picture Oscar contenders that skipped TIFF last fall in favour of the New York Festival. Nebraska, which had also been unveiled in May at Cannes, did likewise. Two other movies expected to get best-picture nominations — Her and Captain Phillips — had their world premieres at the New York festival.

Meanwhile, the biggest loser of this awards season stands to be TIFF’s most consistently flamboyant visitor and shrewdest Oscar strategist, Harvey Weinstein.

The Weinstein Company arrived in Toronto with high hopes for Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom and August: Osage County. Both those movies had world premieres as TIFF galas at Roy Thomson Hall as part of a strategy that was meant to lead to the Oscars.

By now it seems clear that while acting nominations are likely, neither of Weinstein’s major TIFF premieres is still in the running for a best-picture nomination.

Scoreboard so far: TIFF’s hopes of snaring the best-picture Oscar for the 10th time in its history and the seventh year in succession rest with 12 Years a Slave and Gravity — with a remote possibility of Dallas Buyers Club pulling off an upset.

Other likely nominees: American Hustle, Captain Phillips, Her, The Wolf of Wall Street and perhaps Saving Mr. Banks (which earned little favour with critics but made the PGA list).

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